Best HD OTA Dual Tuner Solution?

[timnelsonic]

I'm replacing my SageTV hardware with a new box (Intel Quad Core, XP Pro) and this gives me the chance to get new tuners as well. I need two over-the-air HD tuners. The options I'm considering (in rough priority order) are:

1. A dual HD tuner card (the only one I know of is the vBox 164e (pdf brochure) which is hard, but not impossible, to find)
2. An HDHomerun external device
3. Two internal HD tuner cards
4. Two external HD devices

The last two options are pretty straightforward, although I'm curious if anyone has opinions on external vs. internal pros-and-cons.

I'm especially interested in any tidbits on the first two options. My general impression of the HDHomerun is that it's pretty solid, but it seems to take a lot of messing about to get it set up correctly, at least for some people. I've found next to no information on the vBox 164e card, which I believe is the only internal dual HD tuner card on the market.

I've searched the forums and have found good info on these options individually (except the 164e), but if anyone has thoughts on how to approach this decision, I'd sure appreciate it. Thanks.

[Fluffdaddy]

HDHomerun external device

In my opinion nothing else comes close.
100% Trouble free since the day I installed it.

The two internal HD tuner cards I had before hand never give me as good HD PQ and channel scanning was hit or miss for my OTA locals.

[BFisher]

I'll offer support for #3. I have 3 internal HD tuner cards (2 Avermedia M780 and 1 Hauppauge 1800) and have been very happy with them. No issues, picture quality is awesome, and doesn't require network bandwidth (a potential (possibly non-issue) limitation in my opinion of HDHR if you are recording and playing multiple things at the same time)

[timnelsonic]

I wondered about network bandwidth as an issue w/ the HDhomerun. My current network is a combination of wired/wireless. I didn't do the math but I could imagine that several concurrent HD streams could cause issues.

-Tim

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Fluffdaddy

The two internal HD tuner cards I had before hand never give me as good HD PQ...

Hard to see how a digital tuner could affect PQ since it's just copying the MPEG to disk as it comes from the provider.

Now if you're comparing OTA HD to QAM cable HD, then you might see a difference in PQ, because they're coming from different providers. But the tuner can't be blamed for that.

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Hard to see how a digital tuner could affect PQ since it's just copying the MPEG to disk as it comes from the provider.

Now if you're comparing OTA HD to QAM cable HD, then you might see a difference in PQ, because they're coming from different providers. But the tuner can't be blamed for that.

With the internal HD tuner cards ( AVerTVHD A180) I was having bad breakups and picture blacking out. With the HDHomerun it cleared all that up, I can only go with my personal experience between the two.

[Opus4]

There can be one other issue: signal strength & whether you end up with a recording at all. I've seen some people post that one digital tuner may work better with a less powerful signal than another digital tuner.

But, even in this case, it still is a matter of either ending up with the recording or not -- it won't degrade the quality of the video itself; it just can't record it at all if it can't tune the signal.

Edit: I see that was essentially what was posted while I typed this.

- Andy

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by Opus4

There can be one other issue: signal strength & whether you end up with a recording at all. I've seen some people post that one digital tuner may work better with a less powerful signal than another digital tuner.

But, even in this case, it still is a matter of either ending up with the recording or not -- it won't degrade the quality of the video itself; it just can't record it at all if it can't tune the signal.



- Andy

Points taken

[blade]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Hard to see how a digital tuner could affect PQ since it's just copying the MPEG to disk as it comes from the provider.

I saw a huge difference in PQ between my HDHomeRun and HVR1600. It's hard to explain, but with the 1600 it was very pixelated and there were green blocks that popped up here and there. I've never experienced any of that with captures from my HDHomerun.

Pretty sure it has to do with signal strength, but either way there was a significant difference in quality of the recording. Reminded me a little of when a heavy rain used to cause the picture to breakup when I had Directv.

[GKusnick]

Sure, there can be dropouts, pixelation, and other artifacts due to bad reception, and one tuner might be better than another in that regard. But I wouldn't call those PQ issues. Picture quality (as I understand the term) generally refers to image sharpness, color fidelity, compression artifacts, etc, which in the case of digital TV are all determined by the provider, not the tuner.

[DigitalMan]

Dvico just announced a new card, the Fusion HDTV7 dual express. Looks pretty interesting. From the picture it looks like there's only one antenna input (besides the analog inputs)

Personally I would rather the internal splitters this has compared to my ATI cards with the extra wires .

It also means if you want OTA and QAM you would need to get 2 of these, which would give you 2 OTA and 2 QAM.

The PIP feature sounds interesting if it could be made to work in sage.

[paulbeers]

I am throwing my vote to the HDHomerun. Yes network bandwidth can become a problem on an 10/100 network. You can always add a second ethernet card to your server and hook your HDHomerun directly to that so that you do not end up with that issue or in my case I just have my servers on a gigabit network so it isn't an issue....I like the HDHomerun since I don't have to worry about my server needing an extra PCI or PCIE slots (PCI has become such a problem with many boards coming with as few as 1 PCI slot.

[m1abrams]

NOTE: I have only personal experience with the HDHomerun and Analog tuners. No other HD tuner experience.

However the HDHomerun has worked very well for me over the past several months. I personally like that it is a network device, it makes sense to me. Like the above poster stated if you are concerned about network bandwidth just drop another NIC in your server (heck most modern motherboards have 2 onboard nowadays) and dedicate that to the HDHomerun.